1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the instruction and data tracing, more particularly, to instruction and data tracing in an integrated circuit (IC) having an embedded processor.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are various products available that enable tracing of data produced by a software program executed by a processor. The data trace is used to debug and optimize the software program. The conventional data trace is voluminous and occupies a large amount of storage. However, for a processor embedded in an integrated circuit, the amount of trace data that can be collected is either limited by the amount of embedded memory, if the trace data is stored on the IC, or by the transfer throughput, if the trace data is stored in external memory.
In addition, conventional data tracing tools do not allow the recreation of the state of the processor after an execution of one or more instructions of the software program.
Thus there is a need for a reduced amount of data for a data trace and the ability to reconstruct the full processor state.